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Knowledge in Exile: Translating Science for (and in) 19th century Central Europe

29 April 2025, 5:00 pm–7:00 pm

Evolution according to the Darwin theory, c. 1900 postcard

A Study of Central Europe seminar with Katalin Straner

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

Free

Organiser

SSEES

Location

Masaryk room
UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies
16 Taviton street
London
WC1H 0BW

This talk will introduce aspects of my research on the translation and reception of Darwinism and evolutionary thought in the 19th-century Habsburg Empire — such as the transformative role of political exile in cultural translation and knowledge production. Focusing on early translators as mediators of science primarily in the ‘long 1860s’, the paper will explore ways in which they saw their work as a contribution to scientific knowledge production, political development, and cultural progress in Hungary. Negotiating place for themselves in the transforming Hungarian scientific community was especially challenging to those who were trying to do this in displacement. This was particularly the case for political exiles of the 1848 revolution: establishing new connections with the scholarly community of the host country while also trying to maintain links to their home networks could be quite challenging.

Image: Evolution according to the Darwin theory, c. 1900. Katalin Straner - personal collection.

 

About the Speaker

Katalin Straner

Katalin Straner
is Lecturer in History at Newcastle University. Her research and teaching focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, with specialisms in the history of science, migration, and urban history. She is especially interested in the mobility of ideas and people; in particular how (and where) knowledge is produced, communicated, and transformed by people in motion across various cultural, social, and political contexts — and how knowledge shapes those contexts. She explores these questions in and beyond the Habsburg Empire and its successor states, and between East Central Europe and the West, particularly Britain, in the nineteenth and twentieth century. She is a Council Member of the British Society for the History of Science, and former Reviews Editor of Jewish Culture and History.